Troy: Old Town, New Town

There have been two Troys in Bell County, Texas. The first grew up along Elm Creek with a post office established in eighteen fifty-four, taking the name Troy, most likely after Troy, New York, the hometown of an early settler. When the railroad arrived in eighteen eighty-two, it bypassed old Troy by two miles.

Settlers followed the tracks, and New Troy rose on the rail corridor, becoming the dominant community almost immediately. By eighteen eighty-four, New Troy had two hundred fifty residents, a post office, two churches, a hotel, three saloons, a cotton gin, and a cooperative association. The old Elm Creek settlement faded away.

Today the single city of Troy sits in the Killeen-Temple metropolitan area with a population of about twenty-four hundred, its nineteenth century doubling mostly forgotten.